Google’s cultural asphyxiation
My views on the Google Book Settlement are straightforward: solve the antitrust problem. Google will gain automatic access to your work via the Book Rights Registry on an involuntary basis, and that’s utterly insane. Squabbles over copyrights, fair use, privacy, author compensation, etc, are only meaningful in a marketplace — if the GBS goes ahead as is, then we won’t have that, and everything else won’t matter a jot. Consequently, I see them as secondary to antitrust, and the more we focus on them, the more we get distracted.
After reading Lawrence Lessig’s essay on The New Republic, it’s clear that he thinks there’s an even greater concern, and that antitrust is probably a distraction.
For the problem here is not just antitrust; it is not just privacy; it is not even the power that this (enormously burdensome) free library will give this already dominant Internet company. Indeed, the problem with the Google settlement is not the settlement. It is the environment for culture that the settlement will cement. For it practically guarantees that we will repeat the cultural-environmental errors of our past…
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Before we continue any further down this culturally asphyxiating road, can we think about it a little more? Before we release a gaggle of lawyers to police every quotation appearing in any book, can we stop for a moment to consider whether this way of organizing access to culture makes sense? Does this complexity get us something we would not get under the older system? Does this innovation in obsessive control produce any new understanding? Is it really progress?
It’s a long, but thoughtful piece that looks at the function of cultural artifacts and examines how the GBS will take us down a path that essentially makes them dysfunctional. I recommend it, even if you’re not a fan of Lessig. It also puts some context to the GBS issue, and unravels some of the complexity of the case.
